All commercial trucks, tractors and trailers are equipped with mud flaps which are mounted behind the tires to mitigate the spray effect on wet roads and to prevent the ejection of stones and road debris. Mud flaps normally measure 24 inches wide and generally extend from above the tire to approximately 5 inches above the road.
Presently mud flaps are attached to a bracket by means of bolts. Mud flap damage occurs most often when the flap becomes lodged between the tire and the driving surface. This can occur when the equipment is in reverse on an unstable surface or when the truck encounters debris or other obstruction on the driving surface such as parking bumpers. Once the flap is lodged under the tire, either the flap is torn from the bracket or the bracket is broken from its mounting.
All trucks fall under the jurisdiction of both state and federal departments of transportation. All trucks are required to maintain mud-flaps and it is illegal to drive on a roadway without one. While the cost of mud flap is minimal, generally between five and twenty five dollars, the cost of replacing a mud flap is much more expensive than the cost of the mud flap.
Generally drivers do not carry replacement mud flaps nor the tools necessary to replace them. This means that a service call can be necessary to replace a mud flap, with the normal cost of a service call running between one and two hundred dollars. If the truck is able to navigate the roadways legally to replace a mud flap, it will entail out of route miles. Routing to a repair facility will generally add at least twenty-five miles to the scheduled route. The cost of operating a truck/trailer combination averages in excess of one dollar per mile.
If a truck is discovered to have missing or faulty mud flaps by any law enforcement agencies or the department of transportation, it is possible that the truck will be put out of service at that location until arrangements have been made to repair the mud flap on the road.
In addition all interstate carriers are governed by the Interstate Commerce Commission and as part of that governance, the government maintains Safe Stat statistics on each carrier, which utilize the information generated from roadside and weigh scale inspections. Missing or damaged mud flaps will generate a negative finding and adverse impact on the Safe Stat numbers. These numbers are extremely important to a trucking company as they are given a major weighting in the determination of insurance rates.
Trucks also run a liability risk if improper mud flaps cause road debris or stones to impact other vehicles.
The other major cost to mud flap failures is the time to repair. Under DOT regulations, a driver is limited on the number of hours worked in a day and aggregate hours worked in a seven or eight day period. Time spent in having a mud flap repaired or replaced is counted against the allowable hours worked in any one day or seven day period. The average revenue lost due to one hour of waiting for a repair is $87.50. Repairs can easily take two or three hours. While on average, trucks and trailers lose several flaps in a year, and in some applications may lose up to that many in a week, the cost of a slip flap bracket would be less than the loss of one hour's revenue.
Accordingly, it is important to be able to immediately and easily replace the mud flap in order to minimize the length of time the semi tractor and trailer are delayed from proceeding.
A number of prior art mud flap holders and mounting systems have been patented including U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,044,667; 7,040,662; and 7,226,086. However, it does not appear that any of these has gained wide spread use. Some of the prior art mud flap holders have moldable parts which can be lost or damaged when the mud flap is violently torn therefrom while others require a mud flap having enlargements or other configurations different from the standard mud flaps which have parallel front or back surfaces such that the mud flap has a substantially uniform thickness. It is unlikely that truck stops would be willing to stock mud flaps having configurations other than ones with a uniform thickness between the front and rear panels.